Programme Highlight: Living Room

by UnseenJuly 26 2017

Unseen Amsterdam offers a dynamic programme to engage with contemporary photography. In this new feature, we will shed some light on the exciting programme highlights we have planned for the 2017 edition.

This week, we are delighted to present the Unseen Living Room. Hosting panel discussions, in depth lectures, talks, interviews and artist presentations, the Living Room is a place where you can soak up recent developments and gain fresh insights into the medium of photography in an open and informal environment. Each year, the Living Room connects emerging artists with a variety of leading figures to provide a broad range of perspectives on today’s photographic climate. New this year, the Living Room will be co-curated by Barbican, London and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), Tucson USA, who both brilliantly represent Unseen’s broad ambitions and international flair.

The Center for Creative Photography will be responsible for hosting the morning programme in the Living Room, which will kick start the day with short and lively presentations by a broad range of speakers from the worlds of curating, collecting or editing. Sharing excitement about the work of emerging or overlooked photographers that have caught their eye, the daily programme features talks from Rebecca A. Senf (Center for Creative Photography), W.M. Hunt (collector, contributor to L’Oeil de la Photographie), Krzysztof Candrowicz (Hamburg Triënnale, Fotofestiwal Łódz), Simon Karlstetter (DER GREIF) amongst others.

The Barbican will head up the longer and more in-depth panel discussions in the Living Room, including a conversation between Richard Mosse and Edmund Clark, moderated Anthony Downey, which will focus on how photography can best respond to current political issues. Political discussions such as this will take place alongside questions of collecting, which will be talked over by Howard Greenberg, Maria Sukkar and Pierre Brahm who will present their personal collections and their inside take on what it means to collect photography today.

In addition, Unseen Amsterdam invites a range of established and emerging artists to the floor, including Broomberg & Chanarin, Nadav Kander, Vasantha Yogananthan, and Liz Nielsen, who will give artist talks. These will be accompanied by presentations by premiering artists as well as talks from participants of Unseen CO-OP discussing their collective projects. Alongside this is a programme dedicated to the current developments and innovations in the world of photobooks.